Power saving of external hard drives?

K

kenny1999

Member
Hello

I find that some external hard drives could go into power-saving mode (or sleep mode) after a particular period of inactivity, (usually 10-15 minutes) but some hard drives never go into power-saving mode.

As long as I understand, going into power-saving mode means physically the hard drives spinning down. I think it should be always better for a hard drive to spin down before unplugging the power or USB cable, even if we follow "safely remove", but why some people like to prevent power saving mode of external hard drive? Why there are articles on web talking about that and software there talking about that? Some articles even describe that entering power saving mode as a "bad habit"

What's bad of going into power-saving mode?
Shouldn't a hard drive spin down physically on top of safely remove?

Thanks
 
The only problem with hard drives going into power save mode from my experience is that they have to spin back up again to be accessed, which means a delay of about 2-10 seconds before you can access data on them again.

This problem gets worse when you have a lot of drives hooked up and you do pretty much anything in Windows, because for some stupid reason Windows has to spin up each and every hard drive for anything, no matter where the file is.
 
lucasbytegenius said:
The only problem with hard drives going into power save mode from my experience is that they have to spin back up again to be accessed, which means a delay of about 2-10 seconds before you can access data on them again.

This problem gets worse when you have a lot of drives hooked up and you do pretty much anything in Windows, because for some stupid reason Windows has to spin up each and every hard drive for anything, no matter where the file is.
Click to expand...

sorry for the red part. I don't understand?

After all, if i don't let the hard drives spin down and unplug the usb, would any good chance of resulting file loss or physical damage to the hard disks?
 
kenny1999 said:
sorry for the red part. I don't understand?

After all, if i don't let the hard drives spin down and unplug the usb, would any good chance of resulting file loss or physical damage to the hard disks?
Click to expand...

I don't understand it either.

Yes, depending on what you're doing, you could have some data loss but not damage to the hard drive.

If it's a USB drive just click the Safely remove hardware icon in the taskbar and click the drive you want to remove, you won't have any data loss that way.
 
lucasbytegenius said:
I don't understand it either.

Yes, depending on what you're doing, you could have some data loss but not damage to the hard drive.

If it's a USB drive just click the Safely remove hardware icon in the taskbar and click the drive you want to remove, you won't have any data loss that way.
Click to expand...

i am concerned about external hard drives

i know safely remove is the best bet, but most of the time my hard drives couldn't be "safely remove", returning with message that the drive is still in use or try again later, but i am pretty sure that no programs are using the drives, it's like the drive gets "trapped" by unknown programs, at that time, i could only unplug without safely remove.
Will it cause any data corruption to the data already stored on the disc? I never unplug the USB cable during copying from drives to drives.
 
I'm brave and usually just unplug than deal with the safely remove crap, but if you're really concerned you could turn off your computer and then unplug the drives.
 
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